Re:Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn
by magduf on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:52AM
(#21192934)
>Keep in mind all of these new objects are quite small, just a few miles across. About a billion of them could fit inside Saturn's largest moon, Titan (seventeen were discovered).
With planets, we started getting too many "planets" when we discovered more and more really tiny ones, so we started coming up with new names for them: "dwarf planet", "Trojan", "asteroid", etc. A small rock in the asteroid belt orbits the Sun, but it still isn't called a "planet".
It sounds like we need to do something similar with moons, or else it's going to get out of control. There's likely an absurd number of small rocks orbiting Saturn and Jupiter; should they really all be called "moons"?
All of the discovered retrograde orbiting moons are in similar orbits which suggests they all came from some larger object broken apart. Keep in mind all of these new objects are quite small, just a few miles across. About a billion of them could fit inside Saturn's largest moon, Titan (seventeen were discovered).
Regular moon fits with what I was talking about before.
Irregular moons are the ones with eccentric, retrograde, or otherwise weird orbits and acquisition histories.
The more you get into specifics about this kind of thing, the less concise and accurate you can be, it would take an expert up to date with the literature to go much deeper.